I Got Revenge on My Neighbor with Her Own Husband

I’m not writing this to clear my conscience. I’m writing it to confess how far I was capable of going, and to admit that I’m still frightened by how little I regret it. I hope no police officer is reading this, because if anyone ever connected the dots, what happened that afternoon in my studio would cost me more than shame.

Marisol was my neighbor my whole life. Her parents moved into the apartment across from ours when we were both six, and from the very first day I knew we were going to clash. I could have ignored her the way I ignored the other kids in the building, but she made that impossible: we lived door to door and, to make it worse, her parents enrolled her in the same school as me.

Childhood was a war of hair-pulling, threats, and insults that neither of us really understood but repeated because we’d heard them from the older kids and they sounded like victory. The worst came with adolescence. Marisol’s body developed ahead of mine, and all at once the boys in our class only had eyes for her.

“Don’t worry, Noelia, yours will grow too,” she’d say with a fake smile of pity. “Besides, you draw really well. You had to have something going for you.”

Deep down, I knew she enjoyed every word. She loved making me feel small, reminding me of my place. And I learned to swallow my anger and keep it inside, not yet understanding that bottled-up rage doesn’t disappear: it only waits.

Time, which is rarely fair, played in her favor. Marisol became a woman with full lips, a narrow waist, and a way of walking that turned heads in the street. When we finished high school, I chose Fine Arts and she chose nursing. Our paths finally split, and years passed without us crossing each other’s again.

***

Until one March morning the bell over my studio door rang and there she was, the same and yet a stranger.

“Good morning, I’d like a quote for a tattoo.”

At first I wondered if she was pretending not to recognize me just to humiliate me once more. Then I realized she truly hadn’t recognized me. To her I was just some tattoo artist, a nameless woman behind a counter.

“It’s for my husband,” she added with a sigh of practiced patience. “He turns thirty-five next week and he’s determined to get one. You know how men are with their whims.”

I showed her the prices according to size and design. She chose, of course, the smallest and cheapest.

“This one. That way it won’t show much, and I won’t waste money on nonsense.”

I snorted inwardly. She was still the same: bossy, stingy, convinced the whole world owed her something. I leaned over to adjust the lamp and a strand of hair slipped behind my ear. That was when something in my movement made her narrow her eyes.

“Noelia? Is that you?”

I hid it as best I could.

“Do we know each other?”

“I’m Marisol, we were neighbors. Don’t you remember me?”

Of course I remember you, you total witch. That’s what I thought. But my cowardly side, the one that had spent years keeping its head down, was the one that spoke.

“Marisol! What a surprise, it’s been so long.”

We spent a few minutes catching up. For a moment I even thought maybe the years had softened her, that perhaps we could see each other without resentment. And then she tilted her head, looked around my studio, and said:

“So you make your living painting people’s skin? How curious. I pictured you doing something more serious.”

I smiled through clenched teeth. It wasn’t worth answering. I just wanted to tattoo her husband as soon as possible and have her disappear from my life again.

“Come by tomorrow with him at the end of the day,” I told her. “I’ll do the design and that’s that.”

She thanked me as if I were doing her some enormous favor, completely unaware of what was beginning to stir inside me.

***

The next day, punctual as clockwork, Marisol and her husband showed up. And I have to admit it: Adrián was genuinely handsome. Dark-haired, well built, with a smile that must have opened more than one door back in adolescence. Especially hers.

They came into the small office at the back. I showed him the sketch his wife had chosen and he agreed to it, though with that docility of someone who had long since stopped deciding anything for himself. It took only a few minutes to understand him: beneath the façade of a confident man, there was nothing but someone accustomed to obeying.

I laid him down on the table. Before I began, Marisol touched my arm.

“Do you mind doing me a favor? Adrián gets nervous around needles, and I gave him a sedative. Try to tattoo him as quickly as you can, okay?”

“All right,” I said.

“I’m just going to pop into the shop next door, I saw a dress I liked. I’ll be right back.”

I nodded. The bell chimed when she closed the door and, for the first time in a long while, I was left alone with something that looked like an opportunity.

When I went back to the table, Adrián was fast asleep. The sedative had knocked him out: he was breathing deeply, his eyelids still, oblivious to the world. The tattoo was going on his back, so I tried to turn him over. He was too heavy and there was no way. I figured that if Marisol complained later, I’d tell her he himself had asked me to change his position.

And while I decided where to tattoo him, I saw it. A bulge slowly growing beneath the fabric of his trousers.

“Mmm, yes, baby…” Adrián murmured in his sleep. “You suck me off so good, Lorena.”

I froze. Lorena. He was dreaming about another woman, fantasizing about a name that wasn’t his wife’s. And that, I won’t deny, was music to my ears. Perfect Marisol, the one who had everything, didn’t even have her husband all to herself.

Adrián shifted, lowered the waistband of his trousers on his own without waking, and his cock came into view, hard, much bigger than I could ever have imagined. In that half-sleep state he began to touch himself slowly, repeating the name of this so-called Lorena in whispers.

I was hypnotized by the firmness with which his hand moved up and down. I felt the heat climbing inside me, a wetness between my legs that I hadn’t recognized so clearly in years. And then the part of me that had kept quiet so many times thought for me.

“What if…?”

I went to the studio door and cracked it open. There was no one in the street, no sign of Marisol. I slid the lock shut, went back to the table, and without giving myself time to change my mind, yanked down my pants and underwear in one pull.

I climbed on top of him.

I felt him enter me and my breath caught. My belly slammed against his with exactly as much force as that narrow table allowed. Adrián, still trapped between sleep and the sedative, raised his hands and found my breasts under my shirt, tearing the buttons off me. I did the same to his, impatiently, carelessly. Within minutes we were both as naked as the day we were born, moving like animals in the middle of the afternoon.

Even now my pulse still quickens when I remember the exact sensation of having him inside me, the way he filled me with each clumsy thrust of his sleeping hips. It wasn’t just pleasure. It was what it meant. It was every “yours will grow too,” every pitying little laugh, every year swallowing my rage, given back to me all at once in that room that smelled of ink and disinfectant.

I was just about to come when the bell rang again.

The lock wasn’t for the front entrance. I had forgotten the inner door.

Marisol came in with the dress bag hanging from her arm and froze in the doorway. The scream she let out could have shattered the windows. Adrián woke suddenly, disoriented, not understanding where he was or what that woman was doing on top of him. But I didn’t stop. I looked her in the eyes, saw on her face a mixture of horror, disgust, and defeat, and came while staring straight at her.

For the first time in my entire life, I was the one winning.

***

A month later, the court letter arrived. Marisol had filed a complaint against me, though even she didn’t really know on what charge: her husband still swore he remembered nothing, and proving what had happened was almost impossible. My lawyer told me it would most likely come to nothing.

I should worry. I should feel remorse. And yet every time I think back to that afternoon, to her scream, to her furious face while I was shaking with pleasure, I feel again that so many years of waiting had been worth it. It wasn’t just sex. It was justice, in my twisted way.

I confess it without pride, but also without lying: I would do it again.